Committee Representativeness of the Majority Party in the
Antebellum House
Chris Den Hartog
cdenhart@weber.ucsd.edu
Department of Political Science
9500 Gilman Dr.
University of California, San Diego
La Jolla, CA 92093-0521
and
Craig Goodman
cgoodman@rice.edu
Department of Political Science MS-24
Rice University
P.O. Box 1892
Houston, TX 77251
Abstract
In this paper, we examine the extent to which the majority party contingents on key
committees were or were not representative of the party floor caucus in the antebellum
House. We compare the majority party’s proportion of seats on committees and on the
floor. Using DW-NOMINATE scores, we also address whether party committee
contingents were ideologically representative of party floor caucuses. We do so in two
ways. First, we examine whether party committee means and medians differed
significantly from party floor means and medians; second, we examine whether the
spread of party committee preferences differed significantly from the spread of party
floor preferences. We consistently find that the majority party over-represented itself on
key committees, and find little evidence that majority party committee contingents’
ideology differed significantly from majority party floor ideology.
Paper prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the Southern Political Science
Association, New Orleans, LA, January 8-11, 2004.
1
Committee Representativeness of the Majority Party in the
Antebellum House
1. Introduction
Congressional scholars universally accept that standing committees play an
important role in controlling the flow of legislation to the floor in the modern House. This
has given rise to an enormous body of research on House committees. Far less is known
about the initial development of committees, however—or about how, when, and why
they became central to the legislative process.
Most of the existing research on congressional committees during the antebellum
era focuses on